“I’ve gobs of money, mother, and it would help me if you fussed up a bit. I’ll want you and dad for dinner, and you see I want you to look nice.” So it was settled and the principle established. Fliss dressed her mother handsomely, and upon that rather protesting lay figure descended certain duties of chaperonage, occasional appearance with Fliss, so that no story could be started regarding Fliss’s neglect of her parents. She regulated her mother’s appearances, painted in a background. Mrs. Horton was obviously to the world a quiet woman of no social pretensions who had no worse fault than obscurity, and that was no doubt traceable to lack of money. Plain, but nice. In suppressing her parents Fliss would have done herself harm. Bringing them forward in her seemingly ingenuous, but actually deliberate way, she helped herself, and gave them a certain amount of uncomfortable pleasure. But she gave her mother no intimacy. At first Mrs. Horton took advantage of her daughter’s married state to make several leading statements about men and matrimony and was even curious as to the possible plans for a baby. But Fliss repressed such attempts at intimacy ruthlessly. It became very apparent to her mother that as far as Fliss had planned it there were to be no grandchildren, and other domestic confidences were never made. Fliss established herself and Matthew, after a few months in a hotel, in a house. There had been a few bad weeks when Matthew had told her he was going into the army and she had been compelled to look up the advantages of being left alone so soon after her marriage. But it had come out all right. Matthew was rejected on examination. Some leaky, treacherous valve in his heart cheated him out of his war service. That, coupled with his age, put him out of the running, and a little depressed, but quite controlled, he had accepted as his personal war service the chairmanship of the Carrington draft board. He cautioned Fliss about the propriety of economy, but he gave her her house. It was a very new house and its only sins were its newness and its rather elaborate interior decoration. Fliss had not quite learned the restraint of the inner circles of the wealthy. She could imitate them in lavishness, but to pin herself down, hold herself in--that took more careful discipline. Her house was a bit too complete and it showed that Fliss carried nothing over from the past. There was none of her mother’s furniture which Fliss could use and though she had coveted some of the things in Matthew’s rooms, she found to her dismay that she was not to be allowed to ransack his bachelor apartments. In regard to those Matthew told Fliss that he thought he would keep the furniture for his rooms on the third floor of the new house.